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In the beginning I crush the clam, Mom drops her drawers, and ocean tides stand still.
In the beginning is the roar of the wind against the dunes, the grit of wet sand in my
shorts, and the body exposed.
I am a sophomore in high school. I write this poem for my mother:
Salt.
In.
My mouth. Of course. And yours.
On.
My eyelashes. The shovel. Frozen hands. Short black curly hair. Each strand.
Between.
My legs.
Where the waders don’t reach. Dark, seeping, wet.
Salt.
As you might see, I don’t know very much about poetry. I see how bad the
poem is. I guess the term “sophomoric” is a good description for it. A poem about
salt? For my mother? With the words “In,” “On” and “Between” standing in as whole
lines unto themselves?
Please, that’s not poetry, that’s just crap.
Crap is what I want to write about. What I see my mother do. Crap. In full
stride. On the beach. Between the diggers and the dunes.
The diggers are the ones left of the hundred or so who haven’t yet dug their
limit of 15 razor clams and are still pounding the end of their shovels into the wet sand
of the rising tide, looking for the “show” – the tiny round hole and squirt of water that
signifies the whereabouts of a clam on the run.
The pacific razor clam is a soft shell bivalve with an average size of six inches
long and three inches wide. They live buried in the sand and feed by elongating their
flexible necks to the surface of the ocean to sift through the water for tiny plankton. At
low tides, it is possible to see the round tops of their necks with their round gills like tiny
brown legs of starfish nearly floating on top of the sand. But at the slightest sense of
danger, the clams pull back their necks, which cause them to squirt out the water they’ve
been sifting, and use their strong lower muscle, called a “digger,” to bury deeper into the
sand. Razor clams only dig vertically, living a life of ups and downs. They can dig up to
a foot every three seconds.
To catch a razor clam, you have to dig deep, and fast.
The clams are showing quite well. Which is why our whole family is heading
off to the beach just as it becomes light. Light enough to see the sleep nuggets still
encrusted in our eyes, the wild waves of our hair, the raw red of our cold hands. I see
the white crystallization of salt on my mom’s black hair and think, “salt and pepper,” like
she always says she wants her hair to grow. When she gets old.
The tide must be a good one. Maybe minus three feet. We’re hoping to get
our limits, so fat, long clams in our harvest nets drag behind us on the ground, leaving
uneven narrow troughs through specimens of beach debris: driftwood smoothed by
pounds of churning water, bulbous bull kelp slowly bleaching lemon-lime, green shells
of sea creatures, crabs, snails, worms, Styrofoam, torn Twinkie wrappers, stiff dead
gulls, maggots. I don’t think it will take us long, even though we have to dig extra for
my little sister and little brother because they are too young to be any good at clamming.
We still bring them along, strap a harvest net around their waists and fill them up, too.
We’ll want seven limits of 15 clams. That makes 105 clams.
Dad is the best digger in our family. I stay close to him and watch his every
move, to learn what to do.
“Come here, kid.” He points at a dimple in the sand. “Look here. Now that
could be a clam. Or a sand crab’s home. Or a just a pebble or shell on the beach.” He
taps about two inches from the hole with the rounded end of his clam shovel, short
handled with a long, thin and slightly curved blade. Clam shovels are designed to give
the digger the best possible angle for scooping out wet sand.
The dimple becomes a tiny black hole in the sand and a thin stream of water
shoots out.
“Dig!” he says. “No, put your shovel to the sea side. There. About four inches
back.”
“What’s four inches?” I yell in panic. “Here?” I don’t want to make any
mistakes.
“Here,” he says, and plunges his own shovel deep into the sand about three
inches closer than my own.
“Use my shovel,” he says, “and dig fast.”
I drop my shovel onto the beach and rock Dad’s seaward to loosen the sand.
Already, I can see the clam is on the move, the hole is drying up. I dump the shovelful
of sand to the side.
“One more scoop,” he says. “Deep. Then reach in there and get it.”
The best way to dig clams is to scoop out two, or at the most three, shovelfuls
of sand, then fall on your knees and plunge your hand as far as you can into the hole
you’ve just created, before the wet sand and water washes over and fills it back in. With
your arm up to your elbow in the sand, you wriggle your hand, blindly searching for
something that isn’t sand, something either soft or hard. If you feel something hard,
you’re in luck. That means you’ll most likely be able to grab hold of the clam’s shell and
have enough leverage to pull it easily out of the hole. If you feel something soft, you
know you’re in for a fight.
“I got the neck!” I say. And I do, but just barely between my thumb and
forefinger, and the clam is pulling away downward.
“Easy,” he says. “Just hang on, and ease it out.”
It feels like there is no way I am going to be able to ease it out. It is all I can do
to keep hold of it. I know if I pull too hard, I’ll pull the neck off – not only losing the
clam but killing it without purpose as well. I try to pull back some of the sand with my
left hand to get a better grip. The ragged sleeve of my old volleyball sweatshirt falls out
of its roll on my forearm and soaks in the salty cold of the Pacific Ocean. I try pulling
it up with my teeth. Salt and sand. My bangs, heavy with ocean spray, fall across my
eyes. I push them away with the back of my free arm and blink to keep the sand from
my eyes.
Razors dig away from the clammer by extending their digger from the shell and
moving it downward in the sand. The clams flatten out this digger, anchoring it in the
sand. They then pull their body down to the anchored foot. This clam has its foot
firmly anchored and is working its body down to it with little pulsing gulps. I hold on.
I wriggle my hand further into the sand and take a quick look over my back
shoulder to see when the next wave will wash through. With just a little more water in
this sand hole I think I can manage to get a better grip on the shell. And with any luck
I’ll be able to pull it up from its retreat and add it to my nylon basket.
The tide is on its way in, but the break is still quite a distance out. I’ll just have
to wait a bit for the next wash.
“I got it now,” I tell Dad. He moves on down the beach, prodding the tidal sand
with the point of his shovel.
I watch him for a bit, then look to see how the rest of the family is making out.
Everyone is crouched over but standing, poking the sand. I’m the only one on all fours,
my arm up to my elbow in sand.
Mom comes up to me. “Got yourself a keeper there?” she asks. She’s wearing a
harvest net, but there aren’t any clams. “Just be careful you don’t break the shell.” And
she hurries off towards the dunes, lumbering like a dark polar bear against the tan sand
towards the camper parked up the beach.
“I’m being careful,” I say to the roar of the ocean and the sand near my mouth.
I look over my shoulder again. Still no sign of the wave that should come and help ease
the clam from the sand.
I watch Mom as she retreats to the dunes. She’s walking faster than usual and
then I see her do it. As she’s walking away from me, she drops the harvest net from
around her waist and holds it in her hand as she pulls down her brown rubber pants
and plops out two round poops right on the beach. She doesn’t squat to let them go,
just bends over a bit in mid stride. She doesn’t stop to examine them, or to wipe. Still
walking towards the camper she pulls up her pants, ties the harvest basket around her
waist and takes a quick look back at the beach. I think I’m the only one who sees her,
it happens that fast.
Then the wave splits into me. It knocks me shoreward and I hit my chin on the
sand as I go under. The Pacific Ocean is cold and green this far north and the shock
of it, the surprise of it, kicks the air out of me. Somehow I still hold onto the neck of
the clam. The water swirls around me only for a couple of seconds before beating back
against the sand to the ocean’s wild expanse. As it retreats, I feel the clam pull further
down, but the wetter sand has opened up a way for me to get a grip on the shell. With
my hand full of sand and what I hope is a clam worth the freezing dunking I’ve just
taken, I pull my arm out of the watery mess.
My sweatshirt is soaking, water has flushed into my waders and filled up my
boots, my hair is plastered to my face, and there’s a red abrasion forming on my chin.
But I pull up the clam, rinse it in the retreating water, and hold it at arms’ length to take
a look.
“You broke the shell,” Mom says on her way back from the dunes to the beach.
“It’ll be hard to get clean.”
I want to shout out how she’s the one who’s hard to clean. She’s the one who
craps on the beach and then doesn’t wipe. She’s the one who doesn’t work hard for
anything but then expects every reward. She’s the one whose basket I’ll have to help fill
and whose clams I’ll have to clean. She’s the one who keeps me from being the hero I
know I am. She’s the one who makes me cry myself to sleep at night and think about
running away from home. She’s the one who isn’t teaching me the right way, the way to
be in the world. She’s the one.
I want to yell this to her. But I don’t. And it isn’t only because I know she’d add
to the abrasion on my chin if I did. I want to yell these things, but somewhere I know
I’m just like her. And so, instead, I write her a poem.
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